Sorry for the late reply to this. When I did it, I was told (and I believe the directions tell you the same) that the bumper does have to be removed. Oddly enough, the main reason for the bumper coming off is to remove the driver side headlight. I've since come across someone on here claiming it can be done without taking the bumper off, just takes some careful force holding part of the bumper away while you remove the headlight. The bumper is not really hard to take on and off other than there a bunch of plastic pins going across the bottom and I found it kinda tricky to line the bumper and plastic inner liner up and get all those back in. Good luck, let me know if I can answer anything else.